With emergence of various communication services, new radio access technologies have been developed, which typically provide faster communication rates between wireless communication devices. In current communication networks, wireless communication devices connects to each other via RANs (Radio Access Networks) and core network nodes, as will be illustrated below in conjunction with the FIG. 1.
The term “wireless communication device” will be used throughout this description to denote any device which is capable of wireless communications. The term wireless communication device may thus include any device, which may be used by a user for wireless communications. Accordingly, the term wireless communication device may alternatively be referred to as a mobile terminal, a terminal, a user terminal (UT), a user equipment (UE), a wireless terminal, a wireless communication device, a wireless transmit/receive unit (WTRU), a mobile phone, a cell phone, a table computer, a smart phone, etc. Yet further, the term wireless communication device includes MTC (Machine Type Communication) devices, which do not necessarily involve human interaction. MTC devices are sometimes referred to as Machine-to-Machine (M2M) devices.
The term “USIM”, standing for Universal Subscription Identity Module, is used throughout this document. It is understood by the man skilled in the art that this functionality can also be provided by a soft-SIM, an M2M SIM, eSIM, virtual SIM or any other contraption providing the same functionality.
With reference to FIG. 1, which is a schematic overview of a communication network 100, a scenario where two wireless communication devices 102, 104 communicate with each other will now be described in accordance with existing art.
In this example, the first wireless communication device 102 is a UE and the second wireless communication device 104 is a HDTV (High Definition TeleVision) device. The UE 102 and the HDTV device 104 are located in a room of a building (dashed line). When user data will be transported from the UE 102 to the HDTV 104, the user data (dashed-dotted line) is transported on a first radio bearer via an eNodeB (Evolved NodeB) 106 to the core network, where a mapping is performed between the first radio bearer and a second radio bearer, and transported forward on the another radio bearer via the eNodeB 106 to the HDTV 104. The wireless communication devices are physically connected to the eNodeB by radio as seen in the figure, but to illustrate the principle solution, the transport of user data is illustrated by the dash-dotted line. The functionality of radio bearer mapping is arranged in a suitable core network node and is typically performed in accordance with the PDCP (Packet Data Convergence Protocol. For traditional radio access technologies the RANs have been bottlenecks for communication capacity. However, with emergence of modern and faster radio access technologies, limited communication capacity in backhaul networks which connect the RAN nodes, e.g. eNodeBs, have more and more been bottlenecks in the communication networks.
Thus, in order to increase end users experience, there is a need to make better and more effective use of installed communication resources.